From The Seattle PI
By Thomas P.M. Barnett

A vociferous bureaucratic battle will occur across the first two years of the next administration, one that will greatly determine our military’s future capabilities in this long war against radical extremism.

On one side will be pitted the “big war” crowd with its emphasis on “resetting” the force following the inevitable drawdown in Iraq. This is mostly the air-sea crowd from the Air Force and Navy. On the other side will stand — ironically enough — those mostly ground forces from the Army and Marines that are logically slated to benefit maximally from any such “healing period.”

The “reset” argument rests on one very conspicuous assumption: Iraq was a one-off, not to be repeated and certainly no harbinger of future conflicts. It was, in effect, a second Vietnam, an asymmetrical war that cannot be effectively won using conventional military power.

To actually succeed in such warfare, you must make our force increasingly symmetrical to the enemies we face in insurgencies; more focused on generating security, winning hearts and minds, training up foreign militaries, and encouraging economic development. Adapting the U.S. military to these tasks, says the big war crowd, will thus ruin it for great-power war, something it must remain optimized to wage lest America invite such conflict in decades ahead.

In effect, the big war crowd asks us to either abandon our historic role as globalization’s bodyguard right at the apogee of our international liberal trade order’s expansion around the planet, or continue trading off hypothetical future casualties from big-war scenarios against current actual casualties from small war operations, suffering far more of the latter to prevent the possibility of the former.

Read more Pentagon Battle